Host Genetics in Solid Organ Transplant Recipients

The outocome of solid organ transplantation (SOT) has improved over the last decades, mainly due to the availability of newer, more efficient, immunosuppressive drugs. While the use of such drugs has lead to a significant decrease in the incidence of rejection and graft loss, patients have become more susceptible to infections. It is unknown why some individuals develop such complications, while other, even exposed to the same immunosuppressive regimen, do not. Increasing evidences suggest that genetic factors in the host influence susceptilibitly to infections after transplantation. The identification of such factors may improve individual risk stratication and the development of personnalized management strategies.

The Swiss Transplant Cohort Study (STCS) https://www.stcs.ch/about/study-description is a large, prospective, multicenter cohort of patients with organ transplantation in Switzerland. As an added value to the clinical data collected over the years by the STCS, Prof. Bochud and colleaguesf from Lausanne and other STCS centre initiated the genetic working group, with the aim to understand the role of host genetic variants in numerous aspects of organ transplantation, including several infections. These efforts provided several studies highlighting associations of genetic variants with susceptibility to infections, cancer, organ rejection, as well as other transplant-associated phenotypes such as diabetes. Recently, the genetic working group has expanded the number of SOT recipient with genetic data to 6000 individuals, thereby allowing an increased statistical power for future investigations.

• Dre Stéphanie Bibert (PhD)
• Dre Eleftheria Kampouri (MD)
• Prof. Oriol Manuel (MD)

• Swiss Transplant Cohort Study (STCS) https://www.stcs.ch/about/study-description
• STCS Infectious Diseases Working Group
• STCS Genetic Working Group
• Bioinformatics Competence Center (BICC) https://bix.unil.ch